tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Sep 17 06:56:04 2000

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RE: KLBC I'm new


Welcome to the list, charghwIj'a'! I'm taD, the new Beginner's Grammarian.
It's my
job to help beginners here with Klingon. As you obviously already know, you
can add the "KLBC" to your subject line whenever you want me to check your
work. If you're a little unsure whether you said something properly in
Klingon, you can also include what you were trying to say, in English. This
will make it easier for me to make sure that you say what you are trying to
say.

chargwIj'a' said:

> CharghwIj'a' oH' pongwi'e'  I think I did that right?(Cha'w'a' for
> short)  if I didn't please corect me.
> 
maj. This is a very good start.
When Klingon is written, the proper capitalization of letters is important.
For example, the letter {q} is different from the letter {Q}.
Certain letters are always capitalized, and other letters are never
capitalized (even when starting a sentence).
The reason for the unusual capitalization is basically so that you remember
that the sound is different from the letter in English.
So, the Klingon letter {ch} always is lowercase, even at the beginning of a
sentence. And the letter {S} appears as uppercase, no matter where it is in
a word. The letters and how they are written are listed on pages 13-16 of
TKD.

There are just a few small typos in your sentence. You forgot a {j} in the
last word. You want to say {pongwIj'e'} ("my name").
Also, you miswrote {'oH} as {oH'}. The {'} is a letter just like any of the
others, so you should be careful you don't put it in the wrong place.

So, the correct spelling of your sentence would be:
{charghwIj'a'  'oH  pongwIj'e'.} (My name is charghwIj'a')

Your Klingon name, {charghwIj'a'}, isn't a grammatically correct word in
Klingon. However, this is fine, since you can choose whatever name you want,
and it doesn't have to mean anything.

If you were trying to make it an actual Klingon word, this is what you would
have to change:
You're using the noun prefixes {-wIj} and {-'a'}, but {chargh} ("conquer")
isn't a noun; it's a verb. So you'd want a noun
Also, {-wIj} is a type-4 noun suffix, and {-'a'} is a type-1 noun suffix.
When you have more than one suffix on a word, they go in order, from type-1
up to type-5 for nouns.
So it would be {____'a'wIj} ("my great/major _____"). For example,
{yay'a'wIj} ("my major victory").

But as I said, your name can be whatever you want. It doesn't have to be a
Klingon word. So if you like the sound of {charghwIj'a'}, that's fine.


> I'm new, I have TKD and I've read some of klingon for the galactic
> travler but I still don't have it all down yet.
> 
TKD and KGT contain the most information about the Klingon language, so it's
good that you have them both. The information in KGT basically builds on the
information given in TKD, so it's ok that you don't know everything in KGT
yet.
Also, you can also check out the FAQ for this mailing list and for the
Klingon language:
http://higbee.cots.net/~holtej/klingon/faq.htm

- taD

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